I am a leadership advisor to Fortune 500 CEOs and Boards, author of "Hacking Leadership" (Wiley) and "Leadership Matters" (2007), the Chairman at N2Growth, a member of the board of directors at the Gordian Institute and recognized by Thinkers50 as one of the top leadership thinkers globally. I am also a syndicated columnist and contributing editor on topics of leadership, innovation and problem solving. I have been married for nearly 30 years and am a proud father and grandfather.

Consensus - Team Building's Silent Killer

The problem with consensus thinking is most people don’t understand its danger. While all people may be created equal, they are certainly not all equals in the workplace. The thought all employees should have an equal say is just more politically correct thinking run amok. While I’m a true believer in candor in the workplace, and have always encouraged feedback and input at every level of an organization, this doesn’t mean everyone should have an equal say – they shouldn’t. Team building is not about equality at all – it has nothing to do with consensus. Rather team building is about alignment of vision with expectations, ensuring team members clearly understand their roles, and making sure they have the right resources to perform said duties with exacting precision. Consensus thinking is devastating to all things productive

I’ve often said that theory without action amounts to little more than useless rhetoric, and while most companies are spinning their wheels pontificating on the merits of team building, it is the truly great organizations that put theory into practice. Great leaders intrinsically understand team building catalyzes collaboration, creates both disruptive and incremental innovation, facilitates a certainty of execution, and is one of the key foundational elements associated with creating a dynamic corporate culture. Consensus thinking undermines all of the aforementioned. Just as consensus is team building’s silent killer, it is also often the assassin of culture.

It is one thing to be able to recruit talent, something altogether different to properly deploy individual talent, and quite another thing to have your talent play nicely in collaboration with one another. It is the responsibility of executive leadership to set the tone for great teamwork by putting forth a clearly articulated vision, and then aligning every aspect of strategic and tactical decisioning with said vision. A lack of clarity, obviously flawed business logic, or constantly shifting priorities/positions are the death of many a venture. However chief executives who implement a well thought out and clearly articulated vision, create a sense of stability and a bond of trust among the ranks. This in turn leads to a very focused, coordinated, and ultimately, a very passionate work environment. It is not too difficult to get your crew all oaring together when these characteristics are firmly in place because they now know which direction to row.

Team building should have nothing to do with ego, tenure or titles, but rather it should be all about competency, collaboration and productivity. Leaders must clearly communicate to team members what their duties, roles, and responsibilities are, as well as setting forth a road map for performance expectations. Team building, group dynamics, talent management, leadership development, and any number of other functional areas are much more about clarity, focus, aligning expectations, and defining roles than creating equality. If you examine the most effective teams in the real world you’ll find numerous examples which support the thoughts being espoused in this text.

Whether you look at athletic teams, military teams, executive teams, management teams, technical teams, design teams, functional teams, or any other team, you’ll find the best of the best have structure, a hierarchy of leadership, a clear understanding of roles, responsibilities and expectations, clear and open lines of communication, well established decisioning protocol, but nowhere is equality found as a key success metric for teams. Can you imagine the manager of a Major League Baseball team letting the players determine how the line-up card will be filled out? How about a drill sergeant asking privates for their opinions on the best way to train? Sadly, this is the type of thinking which has invaded far too many organizations. Decisioning by consensus usually results in no decision being made, or an intellectually dishonest, watered-down decision that is so full of compromises, hedges and caveats that a non-decision might have been preferable.

Groupthink is a very dangerous practice. It stifles innovation, discourages candor, disdains dissenting opinions, and mutes the truth. If what you seek is to neutralize your advantage by dumbing down the insights, observations and contributions of your team, then by all means default to consensus thinking.

“There is no “I” in Team” and many other statements to that effect were never meant as endorsements for management by consensus. They are simply meant to foster a spirit of cooperation. Understanding how to lead and motivate groups and teams should not be considered one in the same with creating false perceptions of equality that don’t exist (Read: There is an “I” in Team). Real leadership means knowing when you should make the decision and when you should let others make the decision. Smart leaders may choose from time-to-time to give away authority, but they never give away responsibility – ultimately they own the decision regardless of who makes it and/or how it’s made.

Bottom Line: Show me any team created of equals and I’ll show you a team that will never reach its full potential…

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Hi Mike, nice article. It is true there has to be a diversity in team, otherwise there is no challenge in handling the team. As it is rightly said,”Unity in diversity”. Thank you, you continually put the grey cells into action.

I played sports while growing up. I was in the military for 22 years. I’m in the middle of my 18th year at my 2nd career. It was during the last half of this career that I saw ‘Team’ come in to play and ‘Consensus’ was the ultimate goal. It is a defacto starting point for any ‘team’ I’m assigned to that we’ll not look for majority approval, we’ll accept ‘consensus’ which if further defined as ‘you can live with it’. Marvelous, what a great way to start a new project. A room full of people with various strengths and weaknesses, opportunities to grow, learn, and become better and we start by putting the measure of success with ‘you can live with the results’. This was the first place in my professional career that I was on a team where everyone was equal. What the heck is that all about? What other ‘team’ in the world has everyone equal? Any sports team (unless it’s a solo appearance like a diver) is made up of individuals with particular strengths (size, speed, ball handling ability, etc.) that when used as a complimentary whole, achieve victory. I’ve been on ‘fire teams’ where we put out shipboard fires. Not everyone was a ‘nozzleman’ …. you had to have a tender, a hose man, a manifold man, a messenger, a fire team director…… that was a TEAM. Now while we were eventually all qualified to position ourselves along any part of that fire team, it took time, training, and experience to master that particular position. I see the same in our project teams. They are made up of people with various skillsets that will complement the whole, but they’ll never be ‘equal’ in any aspect of professional knowledge, skill, or abilities. They won’t even be equal when they’re told they’re equal and woe be to the poor soul that thinks they are and they are found out to be wanting. No, there may not be an “I” in Team, but there sure as heck is a ‘ME’ if you look for it and pull it out of the mix and use it appropriately. Talk about opportunities for any ‘team’ leader today – show each individual exactly why they are NOT ‘equal’, they they should NOT settle for ‘consensus’, and why they should learn by reaching out farther than they’re qualified to reach, stress their limits of knowledge, skills, and abilitites, and grow! Growth is never the result of ‘we can live with the results’.

Great post and I completely agree with the notion that consensus-building and groupthink can be barriers to true innovation and putting a lid on any team’s potential. Reminds me of a post I wrote last week centered on the Abilene Paradox and the dangers of ‘just going with the flow’ and a herd mentality.

In short, I think we need to emphasize the difference between treating people/employees fairly and treating them equally. They are two completely different things.

Good article. Consensus thinking is also the genesis of the tremendously destructive phenomena of “workplace bullying”, which has crippled a number of the companies I’ve worked for as a contractor and otherwise. A schoolyard mentality tends to take hold in these situations to the effect that “Well, if there was a consensus on this decision, then no one individual can be singled out for punishment if things go bad.” After all, “My career” is paramount. Anyone who doesn’t get with the program is immediately marked as “trouble” and isolated for eventual transfer to the “exit” track in the effected company.

Doesn’t happen with many companies, but the one’s I’ve seen fall victim to this type of pathology often don’t last long.

Thank you for sharing the astute observations. Given the thoughts you expressed, I believe you’d enjoy reading the following post: http://www.forbes.com/sites/mikemyatt/2011/12/07/politically-correct-leader-oxymoron

In a consensus oriented culture I fear the only possible outcome for a person who has the audacity to challenge the wisdom of the agreed upon “reality” how ever correct that challenge may be, is hardship in abundance. The flutist reveals a multitude of shortcomings that is to hard to face so the tendency is that the messenger of troubles becomes the origin of said troubles. I have yet to develop a personage that can deal with this without becoming ostracized.